Dear Readers,
January slammed us with winter storms, freezing rain, and bitter cold. As I am writing this, the snow has melted, the sun warms the air, and a pair of wrens call to each other in the redbud tree. The first green tips of the iris are poking through the soil, eager to grow, fueled by the energy stored in their rhizomes. It feels as if spring is imminent. I know it isn’t; we are still in for a long winter here, but these random warm days are invigorating, like a thimble-sized injection of hope.
I love mornings and evenings, when the sun is low, and the silhouettes of the trees stand black against the tinged sky. Stripped of their leaves, they reveal their character. The oak branches clutch the air like gnarled fingers. The elms lift their boughs in an elegant curvature. Where the elm is a graceful dancer, the oak is a farmer with calloused hands and a no-nonsense attitude. Both have a dogged determination to survive.
On windless winter days, we burn the field. Old flower stalks and grasses go up in flames. The knots and tangles of dried vegetation disappear and leave a few flakes of white ashes and black scorched ground, ready for seeds to germinate, ready for the daffodils that will come up in a few weeks. In Nicholas Olah’s poem in this issue, “Midwest, Early Winter”, he writes: “It’s a marvel—the way an ending and a beginning can look the same.”
Maybe it is similar for a human life, too. The poems in this issue span the breadth of life, from the dream of a not yet bodied baby to the scattering of ashes. We witness the tenderness of a son taking his blind mother to dinner on her 105th birthday, ponder arriving in the new country of old age, and wonder what last words one might utter—perhaps a poem?
In Olah’s poem, autumn speaks to winter: “Please be gentle”. May winter, and this new year, be gentle to you all, dear readers, and may you have energy stores to draw from, like the iris and the daffodils that emerge even after the harshest winter. Thank you for being here.
Warmest wishes,
Agnes Vojta
